On July 13th, 1928 Kentucky sent 8 men to the electric chair. This is a record for most executions by electric chair in a single day. I am looking for information about this event but I can’t really find anything out about the day, or the people involved. Are there any good resources out there?

If there is a link within the Kentucky Department of corrections that has the case files that would be excellent. I would also thoroughly enjoy any literature I could find on it. I am working on an essay of capital punishment and I wanted to highlight this event and the men executed.

We can start by consulting the Espy file, a database, here organised by state, of all executions in the US from 1608-2002, which not only reveals the names, ages and ethnicity of those executed, as well as the crimes they had been convicted of, but also gives the number of executions that took place on this day.

So, first things first: both this database and contemporary press coverage suggest that only seven men were executed on the date in question, not eight. (Two more were executed on the same day in Georgia, and two more in Mississippi.) Nonetheless, the fact that the executions constituted a record was reported by the contemporary press; see for example the Franklin [PA] News-Herald for 13 July 1928.

The Espy file also shows us that these were, in fact, the only executions carried out by Kentucky in 1928, and this suggests the number of electrocutions that took place on a single day may have had more to do with the local bureaucracy (for example, the availability of the executioner and the cost of paying him) than either any links between the men who were killed or any attempt on the part of the state of Kentucky to send out a "shock and awe" message of some sort. Indeed if we read the Espy file up and down from the July 1928 date, we can see that Kentucky was in the habit of executing multiple prisoners on the same day, albeit more usually in batches or two or three.

A second database, published by George C. Wright in his Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865--1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and "Legal Lynchings" (Baton Rouge, 1996) adds the additional detail that Mitra, Seymour, Moore, Howard and McQueen were all tried in Jefferson County, the most populous county in Kentucky, which has Louisville as its county seat, while Dockery was tried in Harlan County, a rural district in the far south east of the state, and Lawson in Knox County, a coal-mining district just to the north of the border with Tennessee. So we can see pretty much straight away that there was no single link between the men who died that day.

One brief published account of the executions appears in Anthony Galvin's book Old Sparky: The Electric Chair and the History of the Death Penalty (New York, 2015), which notes that the executions took place in Eddyville Penitentiary, beginning at 12.15am and that, even in death, the men were segregated; the four whites were executed first.

A good next step would be to consult newspapers for that period. Newspapers.com offers what it probably the best general database of US newspapers, but it is a paid-for resource. Checks do show it contains information about the cases you are interested in. The Louisville Courier-Journal was probably the largest paper to cover the executions and I would start by looking at its coverage, which includes a front page headline for the day in question discussing an attempt to obtain a stay in execution for one of the men. It reads: "Red Seymour loses fight for life. Is doomed to die with six others".

Here are some of the the top-level search results you are interested in: for Lawson, Seymour and Mitra. I'm sure you get the picture and can take things forward for the others.

In the meantime, there are also some free resources available on the subject. The California Madeira Tribune, for example, published a short news agency report noting that the seven executions "required an hour and 57 minutes", that Seymour, Lawson and Dockery all confessed their guilt just before their executions, and that only one of the men (not named) maintained his innocence. I'm also linking here to a short account of the executions that appeared in a Canadian newspaper, the Lethbridge Herald, on 13 July 1928.

This sort of research can take a while, and I could go on, but as I don't really have time right now to go into a deep dive, I'll conclude with some brief information on the crimes the men were executed for:

Clarence McQueen "killed another negro, allegedly for 'revenge.'"

James Howard "stabbed a girlfriend". He died singing "Lily of the Valley" in a "rich voice".

Willie Moore killed his "sweetheart" with a razor.

Milford Lawson was a Kentucky "mountain man" who "killed a man in a feud".

Hascue Dockery committed a triple murder, and was switched from first to third on the death list when he expressed a last-minute wish to be received into the Catholic church; the switch gave a priest time to baptise him. A March 1926 newspaper clip notes the details of his crime: "Hascue Dockery, age 20, went to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Jenkins of Loyall, looking for his wife. They had been married for only a couple of months and Mrs. Dockery returned back home to her foster parents, not wanting to stay with Mr. Dockery after several alteracations with him. Mr Joe Jenkins was just returning home from work around midnight. Mr Dockery was hiding outside the home and killed Mr Jenkins as he stepped upon his porch. He then shot through a window, killing Mrs Jenkins, who had a small baby in her arms. He shot Mrs Bradley Howard, when he mistakenly took her for his wife. He went into the bedroom and found Mrs Dockery and she promised to meet up with him later, if he did not kill her. He was captured, hours later and was placed in the Harlan jail." The link takes you to a genealogy discussion board which includes several contributions by descendants of the victims that help deepen our understanding of this crime.

Orlando "Red" Seymour, known as the "dime bandit", was executed for the murder of a Louisville coal-dealer in a hold-up.

Charles P. Mitra, identified by Galvin as "a punk", had killed a Louisville grocer, Marion A. George, in the course of a different hold-up.